Fedora Weekly News Issue 170

In this week's issue, we're proud to include the Fedora Weekly webcomic by Nicu Buculei, who has been producing this regularly for some time. We think you will enjoy Nicu's art and humor. Other selected content includes:

Detailed coverage in the announcements and infrastructure sections on the August 2008 Fedora security intrusion, and updates on the upcoming FUDCon Berlin.

News from the Fedora Planet includes updates on the fourth grade math project for Sugar/OLPC, reviews of Songbird and Flock, amongst other birds of a feather.

In the Developments beat, the mysteries of Fedora & OpenSolaris dual-boot is revealed.

Translation: updates on F11 release note translations, and new members of the Fedora Localization Project

An interview with three members of the Art Team in this week's Art Beat

April Fools and the Conflicker worm, in this week's Security Week beat

Security updates for Fedora 9 and 10 over the past week

Updates on the state of virtualization in Fedora, with a view towards F11 feature rollup

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

Fedora Board

Paul Frields[1] reminded[2] the community that the Fedora Board will be "holding its monthly public meeting on Tuesday, 7 April 2009, at 1800 UTC on IRC Freenode."

Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation.

Join #fedora-board-public to discuss topics and post questions. This channel is read/write for everyone.

Paul also mentioned a change in the procedure for the meeting. "We're trying something new (albeit in a minor way) in this meeting. The moderator will still be available to gather input from the #fedora-board-public channel, but will voice people, one at a time, in the queue in the #fedora-board-meeting channel."

Security

Paul Frields also issued[3] a detailed, and final report to the Fedora community regarding the August 2008 intrusion. Because of the detailed nature of the announcement, rather than summarize it here, your correspondent encourages people to read the full link.

Developments

Noarch with pkconfig Files

Peter Robinson asked[1] for help building his gupnp-vala package as noarch. The complication was that it contained a pkgconfig file.

Several helpful responses, such as Michael Schwendt's one[2], suggested installing pkgconfig files into /usr/share/pkgconfig instead of one of the /usr/lib directories. Toshio Kuratomi thought[3] that the problem was that the package did not use the new noarch-subpackage feature but instead tried to be a regular noarch package.

Ville Skyttä ran[4] the rpmlint check and confirmed that it warned exactly of this misuse of a libdir macro.

In response to a subsidiary question Jesse Keating explained[5] that the noarch packages merely appeared to be present in each of the different architecture trees because they were hard-linked.

Fedora and OpenSolaris Dualboot Issue Solved

After Ahmed Kamal reported[1] that a ZFS formatted partition seemed to be causing a Fedora 11 Beta installation failure there was a quick response. Eric Sandeen noted[2] that a patch had already been produced[3] by Dave Lehman to merely log the problem instead of raising an error. The bugzilla entry suggested[4] that the root problem was due to udev failing to recognize ZFS properly.

fallocate(2) Preferred Glibc Interface for Preallocation ?

James Ralston noted[1] the adoption of the ext4 filesystem in Fedora 11 and suggested that in order to use its preallocation features more efficiently it would be useful to patch applications. This could help avoid the current "double write" penalty currently incurred[2] by preallocation in which the reserved space is first filled with nulls. James wondered whether there was a better interface to do this than glibc's posix_fallocate() which first attempts the allocation and then falls "[...] back to writing nulls to fill up the requested range if fallocate() fails."

Eric Sandeen suggested[3] using fallocate(2) which is present in the glibc version in rawhide and provided a test program to investigate how well this would work.

XULRunner Committable by non-Provenpackagers

The summary of the 2009-04-03 FESCo meeting indicated[1] that "Firefox/Thunderbird/XULRunner" are open for commits by those who do not have "provenpackager" status. Also discussed and declined for such changes were: popt; initscripts; ethtool; lvm-related packages; and hwdata.

Jon Stanley also noted[2] that he was going to shoulder the burden of providing his excellent summaries of FESCo meetings.

Provenpackager Policies

Also discussed in the 2009-04-04 FESCo meeting were several requests for "provenpackager" and "sponsor" status. This followed[1] on the heels of work done by Patrice Dumas to codify some meanings and processes around "provenpackagers".

A general concern was expressed[2] in the IRC meeting that the ability of a provenpackager to modify others' packages should not be used lightly. David Woodhouse warned that "provenpackagers who commit to other packages without even _trying_ to coordinate with the owner should expect censure" and Jon Stanley posted a helpful link[3] to a wiki entry on "Who is allowed to modify which packages".

When Jochen Schmitt suggested a compatibility package Tom Callaway replied[4] that this would just be a crutch that perpetuated upstream projects unwillingness to move to Python 3. Tom preferred that Fedora developers would "[...] help port such applications to Python 3, and do so in a way that they detect the version of python at runtime and set defines appropriately. That way, we can have applications ready for Python3 before we actually make the switch."

There seemed[5] to be rough agreement between Toshio Kuratomi and James Antill that some way of allowing python3 modules and an interpreter in parallel to python-2 would be necessary.

Translation

Transifex version updated

The transifex instance for translate.fedoraproject.org has been updated to v 0.5.2[1] to resolve problems related to the submission of a few files. Earlier during the week, transifex was updated to v 0.5.1[2] and the submission problems were promptly reported by NorikoMizumoto[3]. The issues were resolved in the newer 0.5.2 release.

Translation submission for yum, ibus and Virtuzalization modules

Translations for yum, ibus[1] and the virtualization-modules[2] would not be possible via the submission interface at translate.fedoraproject.org at present. Individual bugs have been filed to collect the translations for all languages for ibus and virtualization-modules[3][4]. For yum, at present there is no central bug to collect the translations, however the main module page[5] has the notification and template link[6] to allow translators to file a bug for their language.

Fedora 11 Preview Release Notes Translation

KarstenWade announced the availability of the Fedora 11 Preview Release Notes for translation[1]. The last date to send translations for Fedora 11 Preview Release Notes in April 14th 2009. However, translations can be continued until May 8th 2009 for the Final version of the Fedora 11 Release Notes.

Fedora Module Categorization for Translation

As part of re-organization of translation module categories, a help page[1] is being put up[2] by Piotr Drąg to categorize the various modules available for translation via translate.fedoraproject.org.

Infrastructure

Intrusion update

Mike McGrath sent a link [1] to the list about the intrusion which was sent to the fedora-announce-list earlier.[2]

Mike said that he was waiting to discuss authentication mechanisms for the fedora-servers, Since passwords+ssh keys are not the most secure authentication mechanism. Also it seems that Fedora does not have the budget for any RSA token like system for authentication.

There was a lot of discussion on this thread, with various people proposing different authentication mechanisms which could be used.

DennisGilmore started a similar thread about Auth Mechanims[3] on which he discussed using etoken or Yubikey for authentication.
It was a two factor authentication and therefore was more secure than passphrase or ssh keys.

Artwork

Meet the Lion

After the first reactions following the inclusion of a new wallpaper concept in Rawhide for the Beta release, more members of @fedora-art endorsed the proposal made last week by Samuele Storari for a new concept and Máirí­n Duffy concluded[1]: "I have to agree with this.Would anyone be especially opposed to going with Samuele's Lion idea, seeing that both Samuele and Charlie have committed to helping out with it?".

The work on the new concept advanced with a few Plymouth proposals[2] from Charles Brej and an anaconda splash [3] Samuele Storari.

A Mascot for Fedora? Better Not!

Ashiqur Rahman Angel asked[1] on @fedora-art about a mascot "Is there any possibility of a new mascot based on recent versions of Fedora?". Wile some tried to design a cute character[2], Nicu Buculei noted[3] the past abandon of such an initiative "The general opinion of the larger community was that we don't need a mascot, so we didn't pursue the effort" and [[User:pfrields|Paul W. Frields] went further[4], arguing strongly against "A mascot would be brand diluting at this point, so my inclination is
against having one."

Fedora Weekly Comic

Many of you may already follow the regular weekly Fedora comic that Nicu Buculei produces. Starting this issue, we will begin including Nicu's comic in FWN. Please give Nicu and your editors some feedback on the comic. Enjoy!

Security Week

April Fools!

Probably the biggest not story this week was the Conficker Worm not ending the world on April 1. From a security perspective, designing the worm to activate on April 1 was brilliant. The Internet is probably 90% nonsense on any given day, but April 1 pushes that dial to an 11. If you want to do something and not get the word out, do it on April 1. Had the worm actually done something interesting, would anyone believe the story?

April Fools?

The other biggest non April Fools story is probably OpenSSL 1.0.0 Beta 1 [1] being released on April 1. Openssl has been at version 0.9 for as long as most people can remember. It's great to see it nearing version 1.0.0

Fedora Virtualization List

Fedora Virtualization Status Report

Mark McLoughlin's
status report[1]
this week reminds us that the final development freeze[2]
for
Fedora 11 is coming up on April
14, 2009, and "there's a huge pile of bug-fixing and polish work to do".

"If you're looking to help out, there's no better place to start
than the
F11VirtBlocker[3]
and
F11VirtTarget[4]
tracker bugs."

Read on for more coverage of virtualization developments in the past week.

Using kvm-autotest to test Fedora KVM

Mark McLoughlin
explained[1]
"upstream KVM developers are working hard on a suite of regression tests for KVM. It would be hugely helpful if people could run
kvm-autotest[2]
on their own machines to try and catch as many KVM issues as possible."
Mark also provided
a howto[3].

Fedora Xen List

Experimental Dom0 Kernel Update

Michael Young
announced[1]
his repository[2]
"is up to kernel 2.6.29-1.2.18.fc11. This one is based on push2/xen/dom0/master[3]
rather than xen/dom0/hackery which should be closer to what is proposed for the 2.6.30 merge. It also has CONFIG_HIGHPTE=n (for x86), but my attempts to add squashfs 3 in addition to squashfs 4 didn't work as it seems you can't build both."

First Release netcf 0.0.1

Less that 3 months since compsing the RFC(FWN#159[1])
David Lutterkort
announced[2], the release of netcf[3] 0.0.1. This is
"the initial
release of a library for managing network configuration in a platform
agnostic manner. If I were into code names, this would be the 'what have
you been waiting for' release."

"Netcf does its work by directly modifying the 'native' configuration files
of the host it is running on; this avoids a whole class of problems caused
by similar approaches that do network configuration behind the back of the
native mechanisms. The API allows listing of configured interfaces,
defining the configuration of an interface, retrieving the same (regardless
of whether the interface was initially configured with netcf or not), and
bringing interfaces up and down. This functionality is needed both by
libvirt and NetworkManager, so it seemed only logical to move their common
needs into a separate library."

Laine Stump is already working on patches[4] to add the netcf calls in the libvirt API.

Read the announcement for more information such as the new mailing list for
netcf development discussion and where to find the test builds for
Fedora 10.

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